Introduction
For more than quarter century, Canada has set several targets to mitigate anthropogenic climate change by reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHGs).1However, over this period, Canada has gone from being at the forefront of driving the global environmental movements to laggard country when it comes to the implementation of climate change agreements. Canada is a signatory of the following climate change agreements: (1) The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) in 1992; (2) The Kyoto Protocol in 2002; (3) the Copenhagen Accord in 2009; and recently, (4) the Paris Agreement in 2015, which Canada ratified in October 2016, and in December 2016, Canadian First Minsters agreed to the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change (PCF). Up until the PCF agreements, Canada had failed to fully adopt climate change policies that would meet emission reduction commitments. This is due to a variety of reasons, such as in appropriate designor failure to implement climate change policies, substantial differences in climate change views among political parties, and between federal and provincial, territorial and municipal jurisdictions, and pursuing harmonisation of emission reduction policies with US climate policies—Canada’s largest trading partner. Therefore, the question remains:can the PCF be any more successful than past agreements? Only time will tell if Canada’s climate policy under PCF will be fully implemented, and thus, put Canada on the right path according to government objectives to regain its role as a leader in the global environmental movement.
The PCF aims to grow the economy while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The development of the framework started with the Vancouver Declaration on March 3, 2016, which is built on the commitment already taken by Canada from the 21stConference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris.In the COP21, Canada committed to cut GHG emissions by 30 percent below 2005 emissions by 2030 (Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), 2018).
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